Freschel:I haven't seen Nemesis, yet. Not going out of my way to see it.

Take all of the worst possible things that could be in a Star Trek movie, and put them together. And no, you haven't finished. You forgot about the psychic rape scene that added nothing to the plot, and only served as a really ham-handed way to establish that the bad guy was actually a bad guy. A bad guy who was bald for no reason. Oh, sure, he was cloned from Picard, and this movie retconned the idea that Picard went bald at the age of 18.

Oh god, just thinking about this is giving me braindabhtneadbglrcnhgxlcdnhtwm

Wrath of KhanVoyage HomeUndiscovered CountryFirst ContactA Generic Space MovieMotion Pic - All Other TNG films - Search For Spock (tied for penultimate badness)Shatner's Ego - dude, giving this utter piece of shiat anything but last place is just an admission that you have a green alien chick vagina pulsating away where your heart is supposed to be.

Nem Wan:Freschel: I haven't seen Nemesis, yet. Not going out of my way to see it.

It's remarkable how similar Shinzon, the villain in Nemesis, is to Nero, the villain in Star Trek '09. To basically reheat the antagonist from the film that put the franchise in a coma and hope that carries your big-budget reboot is a baffling move. I guess they calculated that Nemesis failed because people didn't go see it, not because people saw it.

A little from column A, a little from column B.

Nemesis was a bad attempt at doing a TNG version of Wrath of Khan. It failed miserably, both because it was a lame rehash, and because Paramount chopped nearly an hour out of the film that would have helped it make a bit more sense.

FirstNationalBastard:Paramount chopped nearly an hour out of the film that would have helped it make a bit more sense

Oh christ, there was more of it? It was already too crowded with utter nonsense. You could have chopped another hour from it and it wouldn't have changed the movie significantly. The issue isn't that the movie didn't make sense, it's that it did- a terrible, horrifying and pointless kind of sense.

t3knomanser:FirstNationalBastard: Paramount chopped nearly an hour out of the film that would have helped it make a bit more sense

Oh christ, there was more of it? It was already too crowded with utter nonsense. You could have chopped another hour from it and it wouldn't have changed the movie significantly. The issue isn't that the movie didn't make sense, it's that it did- a terrible, horrifying and pointless kind of sense.

The Special Edition DVD released back in '04 had something like 45 minutes of deleted scenes... not re-inserted, just there to watch, including Wesley Crusher back in a Starfleet Uniform and at Riker and Troi's wedding, and a scene at the end with Picard and his new First Officer, Commander Martin Madden (had to look it up on a Trek wiki)..

/Okay, maybe the deleted scenes wouldn't have helped. Why would Wesley Crusher ever come back to Starfleet from exploring the Universe with his alien Catholic Priest?

t3knomanser:MusicMakeMyHeadPound: Star Trek was never meant to be about military adventurism

"Balance of Terror", one of the best TOS episodes, definitely was a military adventure. Overall, I agree: Star Trek is at its best when it's about exploration and discovery. But that doesn't translate well to movies, and without some careful editing and direction, it doesn't work so great on TV either.

But you do hit upon why I hate First Contact. While it's the only TNG-era film that actually holds together as a movie and creates something watchable, it's so contrary to everything I know and love about Star Trek that I simply can't take it.

TWOK my add a lot of military adventure, but at its core, it's still a story about discovery; the MacGuffin that drives the plot is a discovery built by human genius that gives us the awesome power to reshape worlds- and we have to choose between using it to create or using it to destroy. That's a very Star Trek theme. It's why TWOK works as Star Trek while the equally action-oriented First Contact doesn't.

It's also why The Search For Spock is a little rough- the writers backpedal on the power of the Genesis device.

I have to defend First Contact. Picard going apeshiat is completely and utterly reasonable when you think about what the Borg did to him and Picard's utter contempt for losing control. Watch the episodes where he comes home after being Locutus and where he is tortured by the Cardassians.

Atillathepun:Ffit3knomanser: MusicMakeMyHeadPound: Star Trek was never meant to be about military adventurism

"Balance of Terror", one of the best TOS episodes, definitely was a military adventure. Overall, I agree: Star Trek is at its best when it's about exploration and discovery. But that doesn't translate well to movies, and without some careful editing and direction, it doesn't work so great on TV either.

But you do hit upon why I hate First Contact. While it's the only TNG-era film that actually holds together as a movie and creates something watchable, it's so contrary to everything I know and love about Star Trek that I simply can't take it.

TWOK my add a lot of military adventure, but at its core, it's still a story about discovery; the MacGuffin that drives the plot is a discovery built by human genius that gives us the awesome power to reshape worlds- and we have to choose between using it to create or using it to destroy. That's a very Star Trek theme. It's why TWOK works as Star Trek while the equally action-oriented First Contact doesn't.

It's also why The Search For Spock is a little rough- the writers backpedal on the power of the Genesis device.

I have to defend First Contact. Picard going apeshiat is completely and utterly reasonable when you think about what the Borg did to him and Picard's utter contempt for losing control. Watch the episodes where he comes home after being Locutus and where he is tortured by the Cardassians.

Honestly, the out of character bit was in I, Borg, when Picard DOESN'T take the opportunity to use Hugh as a trojan horse to destroy the Borg because Hugh was made cute and cuddly.

semiotix:No one worthy of the term "dork" hasn't already seen Wrath of Khan a dozen times.

/From hell's heart I stab at thee, submitter//[snorting laugh]

I watched the TV Khan episode on Netflix followed by Wrath of Khan the other night. I hadn't seen either in 20 years. I was pleasantly shocked to find how well the original TV episode stood up. As good as the movie it, the original episode is just as good.

FirstNationalBastard:Which is farked up, because in Khan, they used all three dimensions of space during the battle, not just one dimensional head on tactics.

But they still presented it as some unique, one off, trick that Kirk came up with rather then the bleeding obvious it should have been. It was also played like a submarine battle, with the Enterprise having to "surface" before it could fire.

I don't know about Abrams, but I agree with the first part. Scotty never wasted five minutes explaining how he was going to reconfigure the shields, and send a beam of subatomic particles through the subspace wave condenser. He just went down to engineering, pressed a few buttons and told Kirk it would take six hours before he farking did it in five minutes.

Confabulat:AdamK: Confabulat: About time someone figured out Star Trek was always about the characters, not Geordi Laforges bullshiat 5-second explanation on how to get out of this mess we'll all forget about next week.

JJ Abrams has it right.

if only the star trek reboot had interesting characters...

It does. Reboot Spock is a wild card. Reboot Kirk is still Kirk. Reboot Bones is great and I hope he gets more screen time this time around.

Name one character from Voyager or Enterprise that is half as interesting. I'll give you Deep Space Nine and call it even on TNG.

Shran. If ENT got one more season, he was supposed to be on the crew. That would be pretty neat-o, man.

Without getting into the deeper issues of Cochrane being a backwoods lunatic, Cromwell was not well suited to the "redneck mad scientist" role. Then we run into the idea of somebody with barely any resources building a warp drive- that's roughly like somebody building their own version of the LHC in their backyard (note, it's actually easy to build a particle collider in your back yard, and your old CRT TV is arguably already halfway there, but the LHC is orders of magnitude more complex).

Without getting into the deeper issues of Cochrane being a backwoods lunatic, Cromwell was not well suited to the "redneck mad scientist" role. Then we run into the idea of somebody with barely any resources building a warp drive- that's roughly like somebody building their own version of the LHC in their backyard (note, it's actually easy to build a particle collider in your back yard, and your old CRT TV is arguably already halfway there, but the LHC is orders of magnitude more complex).

No, because Cochrane was that brilliant :) I've seen worse plot holes.

It's not so much a plot hole, as much as it's annoying. It's such a cheesy, tropey thing to do. The story could have been much more interesting if the Enterprise crew were really working under the constraints of infiltrating a laboratory. They would have had more challenge, which would have balanced out the action sequences which essentially rendered the Borg completely without threat or menace.

Confabulat:Name one character from Voyager or Enterprise that is half as interesting. I'll give you Deep Space Nine and call it even on TNG.

On paper, you're right. Most of Enterprise's characters were no more interesting than Voyager's, which is to say "not very." Although they were vastly less annoying.

But the thing about Enterprise is that it was actually a rare and wonderful thing: solid serial TV science fiction, nine weeks out of ten. It was as good (and occasionally as bad*) as Stargate: SG1 ever was, and that show ran for, what, ten years? It actually paid off on Voyager's premise (naive, idealistic humans way the fark out of their depth) better than Voyager ever did.

And actually, the characters were more interesting than their portrayals. Captain Quantum Leap ought to have been good, but he was pretty meh. The guy who played Travis was... I won't even say bad, because bad actors still act. Jolene Blalock was actually watchable in this (for reasons other than her breasts), although that may be because she was never asked to do more than not emote, or, in extreme situations, almost not emote.

In an alternate universe with a slightly better cast, in proper syndication instead of being condemned to UPN, and a little luck, it's in its twelfth and final season. In fact, when the proper timeline is restored, it will be again.

* yes, yes, I know. Alien Nazis, and a few other suckfests. But even the best shows have those episodes.

raptormh:No, because Cochrane was that brilliant :) I've seen worse plot holes.

I was under the impression that Cochrane wasn't really all that brilliant. He was clearly smart, but the impression I got of him was a home-grown tinkerer who stumbled on a working principle, then just chased it till he finally got it to work by trial and error. It'd be like a more physics inclined version of one of those good old boys who likes to tinker with electronics despite having no real idea how they work stumbling on a working cold-fusion process, then 200 years later guys like Geordi worship him for what amounts to narrowly missing out on blowing up himself and half his neighborhood.

semiotix:The guy who played Travis was... I won't even say bad, because bad actors still act. Jolene Blalock was actually watchable in this (for reasons other than her breasts)

Sure, Jolene Blalock was watchable... on mute.

I'll stick up for Anthony Montgomery here: he's a standup comedian / musician from the inner-city of Indianapolis who was told to pretty much play Will Robinson, except slightly older. And then after a while only occasionally thrown a bone by the writers and given no further direction. He might not be Gielgud but he clearly got dealt a bad hand with this show.

Linda Park is a decent actress but she suffered from this crappy direction too. She went from "Hoshi Sato, linguistics genius" to "Hoshi Troi" in like three episodes and never really recovered.

The curvewrecker was John Billingsley, the only person in the cast to actually give a damn. And I don't blame them; it was a dumb show. The executive producers' writing credits prior to Enterprise were stories revolved around time travel and people turning into animals. The show was seriously doomed from the start.

Meyer sat down over a couple of days and went through TOS and finally settled on "Space Seed" as the gem of an idea. When they approached Ricardo Montalbán about it he initially said "Thanks, but no thanks." They then called his agent begging him to get Ricardo to change his mind. When the agent sat down to talk about it Ricardo said "I'm really not in it that much and there's not a lot of screen time for me"... to which his agent pointed out the fact "Well when you're not on screen you are all that they are talking about!". That and I believe one of his grandchildren pestering him made him change his mind.

Of course it also helped that he was still in fantastic shape physically and was quite believable as an older but dangerous Khan.

Tsar_Bomba1:OhioKnight: What he loves is not Trek -- what he loves is Nicolas Mayer.

I thought it was pretty interesting that Nicolas Meyer had no previous Star Trek experience. And that is exactly what killed ST: Nemesis. Too much control by the actors and being able to dictate all over the movie.

Meyer sat down over a couple of days and went through TOS and finally settled on "Space Seed" as the gem of an idea. When they approached Ricardo Montalbán about it he initially said "Thanks, but no thanks." They then called his agent begging him to get Ricardo to change his mind. When the agent sat down to talk about it Ricardo said "I'm really not in it that much and there's not a lot of screen time for me"... to which his agent pointed out the fact "Well when you're not on screen you are all that they are talking about!". That and I believe one of his grandchildren pestering him made him change his mind.

Of course it also helped that he was still in fantastic shape physically and was quite believable as an older but dangerous Khan.

Not quite... Harve Bennett did the Trek watching and chose Khan after he was basically assigned the Trek franchise after it was clear Roddenberry had went around the bend.

Nick Meyer was brought in because he said he could deliver a shootable script within something like 14 days... and he did.

I just recently watched Kahn with my girlfriend for her first time. She loved it, but she likes other Trek stuff. I haven't seen anything but bits of TOS abd TNG over the years so all them are on our mental netflix queue. Someday.